By Schubert Ogden
Both existentials and transcendentals are experienced in the vertical dimension, or existential aspect, of experience, i.e., experience of the ultimate reality of oneself, others, and the whole. And the analogy between oneself, on the one hand, and the whole, on the other, is illuminating in both directions, our fragmentary experience of each shedding additional light on the other.
By contrast, ordinary ontic abstracts (from categories through genera and species to individualities = individual essences) are experienced in the horizontal dimension, or the empirical aspect, of our experience, i.e., experience of the immediate reality of oneself and others, although not of the whole, of which, in the nature of the case, there can be no empirical experience.
Concrescence could not not exist and could not not produce particular concretes as its products. Thus that there is concrescence as such, with its two essential aspects of divine and nondivine concrescence, is an unconditionally necessary truth-although it is the only such truth. As such, it is inherent in all experience and in all thought about experience that is clear and coherent.
Of all that exists, everything might not have existed except something and what "Something exists" necessarily implies, i.e., "Divine something inclusive of all nondivine somethings exists." Although all further particularization of mere somethingness-divine and nondivine-is contingent, it is not contingent but necessary that every something that exists is further particularized and that further particularization of something occurs. Nothing is merely something without being further particularized, nor can further particularization of at least something-divine and nondivine-ever fail to take place.
19 April 2009